Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1306826844994404352
Abstract: Two opposing views define the debate on the moral principles underlying human behavior. One side argues a central role for five moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity), while the other argues that two of these (care, fairness) capture the essence of human moral concerns. In an experiment comparing these two views, Wright and Baril (2011) found that conservatives under cognitive load devalue loyalty, authority and sanctity, and become more liberal. Their finding of common intuitive concern with care and fairness supports the two-foundation perspective. In two high-powered preregistered experiments (N = 3275), we used time-pressure to induce intuitive thinking and tested Wright and Baril's finding that “we are all liberals at heart.” Although the manipulations worked as intended, Study 1 failed to identify an effect on the moral foundations questionnaire (MFQ). We conjectured that familiarity with standard survey items may weaken intuition manipulations by eliciting stable opinions. In Study 2, we therefore used not only the MFQ but also novel moral foundations vignettes. Study 2 failed to find an effect of time-pressure on either questionnaire type. An internal Bayesian meta-analysis indicated strong evidence against an effect of intuitive thinking on moral foundations.
Keywords: Moral foundations questionnaireMoral foundations vignettesTime-pressureIntuitive thinkingCore foundations
4. Discussion
Here, in two preregistered large-sample experiments, we failed to find any reliable effect of intuitive thinking on moral foundations. In Experiment 1, answering MFQ items under time-pressure led to no difference compared to the control condition. We argued that familiarity with the MFQ items may make it difficult to elicit spontaneous reactions. Consequently, we also elicited answers to the more novel, contextualized MFV items in Experiment 2. However, the results of Experiment 2 also indicated no effect of time-pressure on either MFQ or MFV. These findings are inconsistent with studies showing that cognitive style affects moral judgments (Van Berkel et al., 2015; Yilmaz & Saribay, 2017a), and in particular, with the claim that conservatives become more liberal when thinking intuitively (Wright & Baril, 2011).
4.1. Implications
The scientific quest for the intuitive foundations of human morality is ongoing. As detailed in our Introduction, there are currently two contrasting perspectives in the literature. On the one hand, Haidt and Kesebir (2010) argue that all humans share five distinct moral foundations. On the other hand, Jost (2012) argues that only two moral foundations are common to us all. In the first direct comparison of these two views, Wright and Baril (2011) tested whether cognitive resource depletion or cognitive load—as compared to a control group—influences moral foundations, but they failed to find a main effect. However, when the two cognitive manipulation conditions were pooled, a decrease in the binding foundation scores was identified on conservatives as compared to liberals. We attempted to replicate this finding in two large-sample experiments but found neither a main effect of intuitive thinking nor its interaction with political ideology.
Another ongoing debate in the literature is whether moral foundations questionnaire items are resistant to experimental manipulations (Deppe et al., 2015; Talhelm, 2018; Talhelm et al., 2015; Yilmaz & Saribay, 2017b). While Deppe et al. (2015) reported no effect of analytic thought manipulations on various moral attitude items, Yilmaz and Saribay (2017b) conceptually and experimentally distinguished between contextualized and stable opinions. Therefore, we here compared the frequently used MFQ items with the less familiar MFV items. Still, we failed to find evidence for our hypothesis that the effect of intuitive thinking on moral foundations depends on whether questionnaire items are novel and contextualized.
4.2. Failure of the hypothesis tests
Null results can have various explanations. First, statistical tests may be inadequately powered. Second, experimental manipulations may be weak. Third, the dependent variable may not be sensitive enough, or it may suffer from floor or ceiling effects. Fourth and finally, the effect under investigation may be spurious. Considering the first possibility, the total sample size in our study (N = 3275) was more than seventeen times the sample size of the original study by Wright and Baril (N = 187). Against the second possibility, our preregistered checks provided evidence that manipulations worked as intended. Allowing us to disregard the third possibility, we failed to find evidence for our hypotheses on two different measures of moral foundations, and we did not encounter any ceiling or floor effects.
Although we cannot conclusively rule out the first three possibilities, the fourth possibility—that the effect may be spurious—seems somewhat more likely than the others for two reasons. First, the claim of Wright and Baril (2011) is based on a single experiment with low statistical power. Similarly, Wright and Baril (2011) rely on the pooling of two otherwise independent experimental manipulations to identify an effect, and it is not clear whether there are meaningful differences between the experimental and control conditions when viewed separately. Second, other findings in the literature conflict with the finding of Wright and Baril (2011)—such as an increase in the authority foundation with cognitive load (Van Berkel et al., 2015), and increase in the care and fairness foundations with analytic thinking but without interaction with political ideology (Yilmaz & Saribay, 2017a). Hence, our results, as well as the findings in the literature, when viewed together, suggest that the underlying effect put forward by the original finding, may be difficult to replicate.
4.3. Limitations and future directions
Even though we used tests powerful enough to detect small effect sizes across multiple dependent variables, our study suffers from various limitations as well. First, our findings may be limited in their generalizability because both experiments recruited participants from the same participant pool (i.e., MTurk). Second and relatedly, despite being a well-established method frequently used in the literature to activate intuitive thinking (e.g., Isler et al., 2018), time-pressure arguably may have had limited effect on participants on MTurk, many of whom are motivated by income and who may therefore routinely complete studies at a fast rate (Mason & Suri, 2012). Our data do not clearly support this interpretation. As compared with the control conditions, average completion times of survey items in the time-pressure conditions were 47.2% faster in Experiment 1 (2.47 vs. 4.68 s), 42.9% faster for MFQ (2.93 vs. 5.13) and 48.5% faster for MFV (3.54 vs. 6.88) in Experiment 2. Even in absolute terms, average response times in the time-pressure conditions were well within the intuitive response duration used in the literature (e.g., within 4 s in Myrseth & Wollbrant, 2017). Nevertheless, it may be the case that the control conditions did not sufficiently promote reliance on deliberation or avoidance of intuitive thinking. Hence, future studies on moral foundations can benefit from forced time-delay conditions in place of control conditions. Alternative experimental methods for activating intuitive and reflective thinking (such as reflection training; e.g., Isler et al., 2020) or designs for comparing them (such as within-subjects comparisons of time-pressured and delayed decisions; e.g., Clifford et al., 2020; Yilmaz & Isler, 2019) should also be considered.
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